Very Late Night Coffee

We spent the last 30 hours out in Rotus (the Rest of the U.S.), driving down to Whidbey Island, north of Seattle, to visit an old friend from California who has joined the general progress to the Northwest. South Whidbey, it appears, is rapidly filling up with our old friends and neighbors. (In urban California, not categories to be confused, generally.)

On our way, we stopped in Bellingham to get gas, where prices turned out to be very cheap. Point Roberts’ five gas stations appear to operate, for the most part, as a resource for Canadian drivers who would just as soon not pay the high taxes that Canada reasonably adds to its gasoline prices. The real costs of using gasoline, of course, are not just the costs of getting it out of the ground, refining it, and getting it into our cars. Instead, they also include all the costs generated by the CO2 that gas-run cars generate, CO2 that muddies the air we breathe and warms the globe as an afterthought. Canada, like Europe, adds some to gas taxes to take that into account as well as to increase the price so that people pay more attention to using it carefully. The U.S., unwisely, does not.

The result of this is that Point Roberts' gas stations are more likely to be competing with British Columbia’s gas prices than with Whatcom county’s gas prices. Yesterday, in Bellingham, the lowest price I saw was $1.59/gallon. The price in Point Roberts was $2.65 earlier in the week, and $2.17 this evening. So that’s a negative feature of living here in the exclave: higher priced gas. On the other hand, it’s as well to discourage use by higher pricing. But I guess I’d prefer that the increased price was going to taxes rather than to even higher oil company/gas station operator profits.

The Bellingham gas station had pumps that could accommodate about 12 – 16 cars at a time and, since it was all credit card driven, very fast. Cars got in and out quickly, but there was, nevertheless, a line, in which we were number six. I don’t think I’ve been in a gas station line-up since the late 1970’s when we had the great national gasoline shortage and people were shooting each other for jumping the lines. Yet one more opportunity to be remembering various sorts of bad old days. Gas shortages, depressions, stock brokers jumping out of windows, soup kitchens.

While we waited, I noticed next to us a maybe 25-square-foot building which advertised itself as an espresso hut. Not so strange except that it is open 24 hours a day. Perhaps too long in Point Roberts, I cannot for a moment imagine why anyone any place in the world would need a 24-hour espresso hut, let alone enough people to make it profitable. Is the larger world really filled with lots of people roaming around at 3 a.m. feeling a big need for espresso? Why would that be the case? Coming home from a late shift, a graveyard shift? Surely espresso would not be what is needed. Surely the next point would be sleeping not caffeine injections.

A truly strange form of economic development, but there it was, obviously in business. Could this substitute for our failure to have local pizza delivery? After all, if Bellingham can have multiple 24-hour espresso huts, why can’t we have at least one? Don't we want to be just a little more like Rotus, just a little wider awake?

Oh, Brave New World

Today at one of our many Point Roberts’ gas stations, the price was up to $4.08 per gallon. The stations sell the gas by the liter and advertise its price in U.S. dollars per Canadian liter normally. The reasons for this are a great puzzle to me: it is as if the owners think that it might be too hard for the Canadians to figure out how to convert gallons to liters and the price thereby, when in fact it is for the Americans that it is too hard to figure out how to convert liters to gallons and the price thus and thereby, or maybe it is just too hard for me. The fact that there are more Canadian purchasers than American ones may be the real source of the problem, though. I generally look to see what the price is in U.S. dollars/liter and then multiply by four, which gives me a figure that is too high, but I rarely bother to remember just how much too high it is. Or maybe it is low. Oh, well. I can do Imperial Measures or I can do U.S. dollars but I can’t really do them simultaneously.

So, the station today was also posting the price per U.S. gallon in U.S. dollars, too, but, alas, the letter set didn’t seem to have enough of the 4’s to fill up the $4 for the three various grades of gas. Or maybe it’s psychological because the 4’s in the $4+ prices were little tiny fours, whereas the numbers for the cents part of the price were full size. Perhaps it’s a comment on the weak U.S. dollar and they are simply reminding us that we may pay for this gas only in the little tiny dollars that the U.S. government has on offer.

Then on to the grocery store where the price of wheat is bringing us new confusions. Canada is a big wheat producing country. The U.S. is a big wheat producing country. So, how come there’s a shortage of wheat in the U.S. and Canada? The answer to this question is neither obvious nor agreed upon, just as the answer to the question ‘Why does gas cost $4+/gallon?’ is neither obvious nor agreed upon. Oh, brave new world, that has such puzzles in it and that nobody in the larger, more official world can seem to explain in any consistent way.

Last week, I went to the Canadian grocery store to buy Canadian flour, which I prefer for breadmaking because it has a higher percentage of durum wheat content and it does not contain barley flour, which—as far as I have been able to determine by personally checking—contaminates all American supermarket flours for unknown reasons. It is said that it makes the resulting baked product ‘softer’—Is this softer as in Wonderbread? Why would one want this? I don’t, so I buy Canadian flour. Usually, I buy it on sale, where it is typically $7.99 for 10 kilos (which is to say 22 pounds); not on sale, maybe $10.99. Last week, it was $19.99. That’s a pretty big jump over the maybe 6 weeks since I last bought flour. That might go some way (although not all the way) toward explaining how fancy artisan bakery breads that were $4 a loaf a couple of months ago are now $6. I can hardly type a sentence that contains the phrase $6 for a loaf of bread.

Today, I checked out U.S. flours at the supermarket where they were between $5-$6 for ten pounds, and around $3 for five pounds of flour, which makes them a real bargain compared to Canadian flour, though rather more expensive than they were six weeks ago. Now, of course, the Canadians can come down to Point Roberts for gas, dairy products, chicken, and flour, all of which are considerably cheaper in the U.S.

My Queen Anne cherry tree came into bloom this week, as you can see in the picture; It’s a very old and very big tree. Maybe I should start thinking about cutting it down and planting wheat?